When U.S. Soccer commissioned an investigation by King & Spalding LLP partner Sally Yates and the results revealed widespread, “systemic abuse and misconduct” across the NWSL and women’s soccer as a whole, many of the findings felt eerily familiar. Three coaches—Paul Riley, Rory Dames and Christy Holly—had all been accused of verbal abuse and/or sexual misconduct. Officials in charge downplayed or ignored the complaints. The coaches moved from club to club freely despite reports of their behavior.
We’ve seen these scandals before in sports, and yet little is done to prevent them from repeating elsewhere.
The Yates report makes it abundantly clear that team owners, general managers and top officials in both U.S. Soccer and the NWSL had plenty of opportunities to . And yet, time and time again, they failed. (The NWSL and NWSL Players Association joint investigation is still underway and is expected to conclude by the end of this year.)
In the six years since USA Gymnastics and Michigan State made national headlines for their mishandling of the Larry Nassar case, little has changed across the sports landscape. The systemic abuse within the NWSL echoed many of the same underlying issues that plagued gymnastics and other national governing bodies.
“I think there’s a tendency to think that NWSL stands alone or that these issues are unique to us,” says Meghann Burke, the executive director of the NWSLPA. “The reality is they’re not, and that’s a tragic truth that what we’re living as players is the lived experiences of a lot of athletes and not just professional and college sports but youth sports, too. It’s not just soccer, it’s all of sports.”
The differences are clear—in one case the perpetrator is a doctor sexually abusing athletes, including minors, under the guise of medical care; the others involve coaches whose alleged behavior ranged from verbal and emotional abuse to sexual coercion and harassment. And yet, both sports found themselves entangled in similar scandals: People in a position of authority knew about the misconduct and apparently chose to downplay it or ignore it entirely. Athletes were left to come forward at their own risk, with few protections in place. A culture was built on silence and fear. Which begs the question, what will it take to finally break these cycles of abuse in sports?
